About

While in studying English and Plant Science at University of New Hampshire, I took Sunday painting classes at the Durham Grange. The teacher was a British man and I was the only student under 60 years of age. Then, when I moved to Pennsylvania, I learned some more at the Baum School in Allentown, first with Joe Kotula and later with Dana VanHorn.

I have lived in the Lehigh Valley for more than thirty years, first writing garden books and then teaching adult and family literacy, but making images of one kind or another for all that time. It is only since 2008 that I have been painting more deeply, with joy, and as if it really matters.

For me, the act of painting is just like dreaming. It helps me discover hidden meanings. It returns missing pieces. The process is one of going out and coming in to feelings or images that in my conscious life I might have avoided or belittled. Some of these paintings depict experiences at specific times and places that can be located on a map and marked on a calendar. Many more are drawn from the Dream World, the kingdom of mysterious irrationality where we spend one third of our lives. Either way, the pieces result from a compelling charge to pull together these realms and become a more complete human being.

To that end, a couple years ago I began work with an analytical psychologist. This inner work involves the amplification of dreams, images, and reflection. Where chaos overwhelms, work with an image or dream eventually brings some organizing principle, some symbolic way of seeing. Where rigid structures paralyze, the same unconscious force tears up the place. Either way the hoped-for effect is a new perspective and a chance for growth.

We learn, as the poet Theodore Roethke wrote, by going where we have to go. The one constant in this transformative process seems to be movement, an energetic circling about the center of our being. On some level, we’re born knowing this: What does a child first draw but the circle of her own face? What does she add next but two legs to carry her on?

I hope these images will carry you to some of your own places. They come from my heart, and speak to yours.

Anna Carr Kodama
July 2011

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling, What is there to know?

–“The Waking” by Theodore Roethke

About Anna Kodama

Pennsylvania Painter and Artist. Since 2008, I have been painting more deeply, with joy, and as if it really matters.

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling, What is there to know?